


Small Bones of Courage

by Chromat1cs



Series: Basingstoke Diaries [15]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Assisted Suicide, Editor!Remus, Explicit Sexual Content, Grief/Mourning, M/M, MWPP, Marauders, Marauders' Era, Mechanic!Sirius, Please read the Author's Note, Terminal Illnesses, please be careful with this one y'all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-19 23:37:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14883419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: Time has been sweet, but she has become unkind. The curse unwinds like a snapped thread, and Sirius wishes desperately that he could find a way to mend it—end by fraying end.





	Small Bones of Courage

**Author's Note:**

> CW: Terminal Illness and Assisted Suicide. I know this is a big yellow yield sign of revealing, but I need you all to please be careful with this subject matter. If you are sensitive to wrestling with mortality, discussions about taking one's own life, and/or the rough edges of beginning the mourning process, please do not read this piece. There is another installation for The Basingstoke Diaries coming soon that can be enjoyed fully without reading the details of this piece, so please know your own limits. Be kind to yourself and know that you can still experience the full finale of this series without having to read this part of you don't want to address the subject matter. I can't cordon off only the sections that deal with it directly, because it's sewn in on a theme through the entire part. So please, please, please trust what you know you're comfortable with as a reader. I'll see you in the next one regardless—thank you again for being such a lovely audience <3

_We walk alone now with her,  
_ _The dogs have broken and turned.  
_ _Feed these words to the wind  
_ _So they may one day return._

_There's little left for us at all;  
_ _Our minds are open and learned.  
_ _Never in your days will you find a pair so burned,  
_ _And we slept with our backs against the weather._

_As we lay on wet stones  
_ _Before the fire's edge,  
_ _We swore to never eat from those bleeding hands again  
_ _And we sang the words together in the embers._

_Not a word, little widow, of the man I was before,  
_ _For the only frailness left is in the night;  
_ _When I cannot find the silver design to take your life  
_ _And the shadows are too deep to find the light,_

_They do not reach the small bones of courage;  
_ _'Stead left to the light by the small bones of courage…_

— Aldous Harding, “Small Bones of Courage,” from _Aldous Harding._

—

The night rips at Padfoot with unseen serrated teeth, and beneath the fog of fur and fangs Sirius can feel the harrowing weight of it in canine instinct. 

The full moon carves a path through the forest toward the latter edge of its arc in the sky, cold on the departing end of winter loathe to relax its grip on the region, and the air steams with each panting exhale that lolls from Padfoot’s open mouth. He runs with a cadence that matches his racing heart. He outpaces the wolf behind him with a distance that has widened by the month.

Padfoot skids to a stop before the steep cant of a ditch hill and turns sharply to bark into the darkness. Only the faint sounds of night reply, and the dog’s hackles rise as he barks again—several times, daring the wolf to show itself. 

A low howl comes from the edge of the path after several more beats of stillness, and Padfoot points to it sharply. Underbrush crashes unevenly, drawing nearer and nearer, until the wolf emerges. Its massive shoulders heave with the effort of breath that clouds from its mouth and nose, whuffing with a scrape and whistle that sounds wrong; broken. Nevertheless, it prowls toward Padfoot with the intent of singular pursuit. The madness in its eyes is all-consuming.

Padfoot feints several times to the sides to test the beast’s reactions, intent on daring it to _Move, follow, chase—_ the wolf snarls and snaps, but its body looks like a burden as it lurches with used-up exhaustion at each of Padfoot’s presses to bait it. 

_Come, run, fly!_ Padfoot’s singular thoughts reel about in his mind as he barks at the wolf again, bounding as near as he dares to the hulk of the creature— _Not as strong these days, is it, frailer, weaker, does it truly mirror Remus like that—_ Padfoot growls to himself and snaps at the air in an aside to hush the buzz of human worry. This is no time for higher thought processes. 

The wolf lashes out with a vicious snarl at one of Padfoot’s closest leaps, and as the dog twists out of reach of those dripping, stinking teeth, he sees a sudden twitch of portentous imbalance in the creature. The wolf seems to catch itself too late; Padfoot lands roughly on a patch of dead leaves and can only bark again, wildly, when the wolf stumbles over the edge of the ditch. 

Branches and grasses crack and crumple beneath the tumbling animal, and Sirius forces himself back into his body without meaning to for the panic that surges up through his throat. _“Remus!”_ He shouts, not purposefully associating the creature with the man but _Merlin damned and blazing,_ the wolf is deteriorating just like him and when the wolf is hurt Remus suffers the same consequences, so he can’t help it in the flare of worry that engulfs him.

The wolf makes a broken sound from below. At least twenty meters down, steep enough to hurt, “Fuck, fuck, bloody fuck,” Sirius chants to himself as he races down the slope and around the forest’s forgotten debris and tries not to break a leg on it. He stops against a rotting stump several feet from the creature, steeling his nerves—one paw is folded at a wrong-looking angle, it oozes dark blood from several patches beneath its fur, and it struggles to stand on its three good legs on the carpet of winter’s fading refuse. 

Sirius inches closer and the wolf flinches at the advancement with a half-hearted growl. Its ribs heave in angry exhaustion, furious as it stumbles to the ground again around a wheezy whine. Mixed emotions clench tightly around Sirius’ throat—fear, sympathy, fury, confusion all adding their weight. “Easy,” he murmurs with a voice that shakes like snapped detritus, “easy.”

He has never, in just over fifteen years of knowing of Remus’ curse, been gentle with the wolf. But in this moment Sirius senses something different in the creature, in its fear-dilated pupils and the tired way slowly gives up on trying to stand on the wet leaves. With a pang in his heart, Sirius realizes the humanity inherent in resignation. 

The wolf moans to itself with a low bay, rough and rolling behind its tongue like rain in a gutter. Sirius knows better than approach beyond the wide berth he’s given the creature, even though it’s clearly too wounded to give chase—he hates the automatic pull behind his diaphragm when he thinks about what this might translate onto Remus’ body. Sirius looks up at the moon approaching the horizon and glances down at the fourth little hand his watch, lunar-charmed to the phases. One hour left until dawn.

Sirius swallows his impatience and shifts back into Padfoot, ready and vigilant to herd the broken wolf away from danger for the last scrap of nighttime.

—

“I’ve got you, love, it’s alright, we’re home.”

Sirius hefts Remus as carefully as he can into the bath and tries not to go mad out of his own skin with every weak sound of pain that Remus makes with the effort of moving. The wolf had skulked and limped along the ditch for half an hour before it collapsed in a clearing, looking half-dead but still huffing difficult breath, until the moon set and presented Remus transformed back again—whole, alive, but badly battered and torn. Padfoot had hardly blinked the entire time he kept sentinel over the creature, and when he could safely dash over as Sirius again he had to stay himself from shouting the forest down around him with the bloody unfairness of it all. He had set Remus’ sprained wrist before consciousness would have made that unbearable for Sirius to face, and he still hates himself vaguely for making Remus hurt any more than he already has cause to.

Rationality used to be so fucking _easy._

“Sirius?” Remus croaks in the stark light of the bath and blinks myopically, his left eye slightly blurred— _The one that’s been bothering him, he needs to get that checked, fucking curse, fucking shit-bleeding curse—_ Sirius smothers the rattling of his inner voice and sits Remus on the lip of the tub as he kneels to meet the glassy green stare. 

“The one and only,” he says with a tone he hopes is vigorous. “You’re home safe, we’re cleaning you up.”

“My arm,” Remus says lamely, touching at the tender spot where Sirius had done his best.

“The wolf fell,” Sirius says gently, “try not to move it. We’ll make a sling.”

Remus scowls to himself with quiet, confused pain as Sirius fights off the wave of fatigue that suddenly rolls through him. He leans over to wrest open the faucets and helps Remus lower himself into the bath as the hot water begins to fill. He tries his hardest not to watch the traces of Remus’ blood mingle with it. 

Remus stares at the tessellation of tiles on the wall with unseeing vacuity, in and out of half-sleep, as Sirius sets to cleaning him up. Washcloth in hand, Sirius clenches his jaw and wars with the doubling fronts of exhaustion and empathy. When he sets to cleaning a gnarled scrape on Remus’ right shoulder, Remus begins to cry softly to himself. 

“I can’t do this again, Sirius,” he begs hoarsely, a slow crawl of tears carving through the dirt on his cheeks like meager rainfall. His chest shudders with weeping gasps, and he coughs violently with their jagged intake. “I can’t, I won’t survive another moon, I don’t want to die like this, please—!”

“You’re alright, you aren’t dying,” Sirius insists as calmly as he can, raw and sheared to the bone by the night. “I promise, I’ve got you.”

“Please, Sirius, please,” Remus moans as he begins to cough again. The delirium of returning to his body still clouds him, rimed red around his irises like the oldest ropes of scars on his waist that stand out so brightly each month—the furious half-circle of fang marks that remind Sirius he has only ever leased Remus’ life from an errant thread of fate. This is and has always been inevitable.

“I’ve got you,” Sirius repeats as he sweeps the washcloth gently across Remus’ history of skin.

They don’t speak again as Sirius finishes washing Remus, drying him off, fashioning a sling, dressing the deeper wounds, and helping him into bed. Remus’ continuing tears are silent but addled with sleeplessness, his recurring coughs thick and blood-spattered. Sirius tells himself over and over again that it’s just the moon. _This will stop like clockwork as it always does, he’ll sleep it off and be alright by morning._

But “always” has lately become sleeping it off for two, three, four days at its worst. Remus has repaired far more slowly for the past five months. This feels worse because it is worse.

Sirius slips between the sheets beside Remus’ silent but fitful rest, naught but a mellifluous sound of thanks from him before black slumber takes him under again, and watches over the subtle furrow of Remus’ brow the entire time that sleep eludes his own conventions. The sun invades several hours later, dreams absent.

If Sirius can’t fix this, he’ll damn well bring the sky down trying. 

—

“Remus.”

Sirius watches with as much patience as he can muster while Remus holds up a hand and finishes coughing heavily into his ever-present handkerchief. The way he folds it away, as if it holds a precious secret, betrays the cover-up of bright red flecks of blood. Nothing could be less precious if it tried. 

“Remus, you should call Basil.”

“How would he he—lp?” Remus replies, interrupted by a residual huff from his lungs. 

“He’s a doctor,” Sirius says plainly.

“He’s a philosopher,” Remus corrects him, eyes back on his book with petulant tidiness, “who happens to be very good with healing magic.”

“Oh would—“ Sirius cuts himself off and holds in a tight sigh. “Could you please just call for him? See if he’s busy? If nothing else, I have questions. I’m not the one who grew up managing these changes, Rem, I’m still learning.”

“You’ve been doing far more than fine, why start consulting now?”

_Because you’re falling apart and I don’t know what to do,_ Sirius’ mind snaps. He pushes it down with a lurch in his guts and shakes his head. “Things are different now, you know that.”

Remus’ fingers tighten almost imperceptibly around his wadded handkerchief. Sirius can tell he feels it to, these shifts in the air since the new year brought a sharp downward turn— _Happy 1987, here’s your partner’s cough that won’t go away, a lovely persistent reminder of the mortality of everyone you love._ They can’t go to Mungo’s to check for sure, but Remus insists it’s “just” a persistent bug. Sirius inwardly blames the wolf instead, as he always has for anything that makes it mildly challenging to be in love with Remus Lupin. 

“If it makes you feel better, fine,” Remus acquiesces. He stands up and strides over to his desk where the Protean-charmed bottle sits at the bottom of its deepest drawer.

Remus sketches out the call number for Basil’s office and stuffs it in the bottle with the unique fluency of frustration, on which Sirius dutifully chooses not to remark. They both watch the bottle for several seconds in silence until, right as Remus draws breath to doubtless say something smart about Sirius’ worry being unfounded, it glimmers that fairy-blue of return with a tightly-rolled scrap of parchment on the inside. 

Remus’ jaw tightens as he unstops the bottle and rolls out the message to relay to Sirius _“Hail, hope all is well—I can stop by after 4:00. See you then.”_

Sirius lets out the breath he hadn’t meant to be holding and nods to himself. “Cheers. Thank you.” He moves over to press a kiss to Remus’ temple and nudge a coil of hair out of his eyes. “I don’t mean to nag, I’m only—I want reassurance. From someone who knows this just as well as you.”

“Yeah,” Remus replies shortly. He kisses Sirius and pats him twice on the chest. “You’re a worrier, Black.”

Sirius decides not to lend credence to Remus’ observation when a gnarled cough cuts into the syllable of his last name. 

The short stretch of hours until Basil arrives passes slowly, with vague tension that chews at Sirius’ comfort like a hangnail. He glances at Remus often, poring over a short manuscript propped on his knees drawn up on the armchair like he used to in the common room whenever he studied at school. 

_You’re going to get a bad back someday, granddad,_ Sirius had jeered more than once. 

_Ah, so you’ve a fetish for geriatrics,_ Remus would retort just as many times without even looking up from his books. It had never failed to double James over in laughter and make Pete flush six shades of red, their friends only ever taking it as the crass escalation of boyish witticism.

Sirius thinks now, as he watches closely with his exhausting tendency to be _A Worrier, Black,_ that it really was quite a fucking privilege that they could joke about Moony growing old back then. 

The hearth flaring startles both of them at four o'clock sharp. Sirius stands up as Basil sweeps into the sitting room, not knowing what to do with himself besides greet the man. 

“Afternoon,” Basil says warmly. He takes Sirius’ hand to shake, the massive grip swallowing Sirius’ with confident strength. When he turns to Remus he catalogues the sling briefly before clasping him by the elbow. “How are you?”

“No worse than normal, but Sirius is anxious,” Remus says, blithe with a little half-smile. “So I think a checkup might calm him down?”

“Yes,” Sirius replies simply. Basil looks at him with light behind his eyes, poised to joke harmlessly at him as well when Remus bursts with a jag of coughing. Sirius feels his expression tighten unconsciously, and he looks at Basil with an unsaid _That’s why._

The tall wizard recognizes it, his large brows furrowing together almost imperceptibly. “A checkup sounds like a fine idea,” he says evenly. 

Remus’ cough calms down and, as he clears his throat, gestures to the spare room. “Shall we?” He asks, his voice shaking with fatigue around common geniality. Sirius sees a tick of true worry in Remus’ face before he leads the way to the hallway, and his insides clench when he catches a glance from Basil that feels like sympathy. The door shuts behind them solidly.

Sirius gets the sudden and distinct feeling that Remus’ tendency to cover up the truth of his suffering has taken one step too far this time, but he shuts it down before it rears up in totality. Stop it. _You’re just a worrier. Be patient._

Sirius hoists open the window by the record player and sits beside it heavily, tucking his back against its wooden bulk and lighting a cigarette with a pinch of his fingers. He starts the well-worn Bowie record already on the turntable from the beginning with a flick of his wand and sings along to “Space Oddity” in the back of his mind to mute any thoughts to do with illness or broken bodies. 

_...And I'm floating in a most peculiar way,  
_ _And the stars look very different today,  
_ _For here  
_ _Am I sitting in a tin can,  
_ _Far above the world;  
_ _Planet Earth is blue  
_ _And there's nothing I can do..._

As Sirius sets the single back and back and back again to loop as it finishes each time, he smiles to himself with the sudden memory of him and Remus skipping Transfiguration more than a couple times in their year 6 spring to hide out in the astronomy tower and make out like idiots. 

_It’s like that Bowie song,_ Remus had hummed against Sirius’ jaw one of the first afternoons, pressed back against the wall right next to the wide, open viewing aperture by Sirius’ insistent enchantment with the way Remus smelled and his amazing, all-encompassing body heat. 

_What, ‘Diamond Dogs’?_ Sirius took immense pleasure in the way Remus had burst with filthy laughter, catching the innuendo without needing an explanation.

_No, you git._ Remus’ sigh when Sirius moved down to pull aside his shirt collar and trace it with open-mouthed kisses still rings clear as day in Sirius’ memory. He had started singing then, soft and foggy like a dream, his hands tracing patterns on Sirius’ back as Sirius explored his neck; _‘…Far above the moon, Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do...’_

_Does that make you Major Tom or Ground Control?_ Sirius murmured as he leveled his gaze with Remus’ again. 

_I hardly think I would trust you to pilot a spacecraft,_ Remus had sallied, and Sirius staunched the surge of affection in him at the mischievous glimmer in those green eyes by pulling them both back into kisses that had tasted of summer.

Sirius starts, his cigarette all ash between his fingers, when the spare room creaks open Merlin knows however many minutes later and yanks him out of the memory’s lingering sweetness. He dissipates the ashes into a curl of air that sweeps itself out the window before looking up at Basil standing halfway out of the doorjamb. His heart stutters to see a frown creasing the man’s square features. 

“Could you join us?” Basil asks simply. 

The words pierce the air like four crossbow bolts, punching into each of Sirius’ limbs and holding him fast to his crumple against the record cabinet for a moment before he remembers how to draw air and move again. Sirius doesn’t know him well, but all he’s seen of the man has proved Basil to be an interminably serene man. The concern inherent in the way he summons Sirius now is crippling. _Could You Join Us—_ Sirius would rather drown out Reality with more reverie but as ever, she beckons with a well-manicured finger dressed up as patent formality.

Sirius rises on legs that almost forget how to support him, one foot asleep for the way he’d had it tucked beneath him. He slips through the door that Basil holds open to see Remus sitting in his desk chair drawn back from the drafting table. His fists are clenched, his cheeks flushed pink with anger. He stares at his feet as if trying to read a complicated potions recipe on the floorboards. 

“What’s the matter?” Sirius asks, his voice rough as it emerges. Remus doesn’t look up, and Basil offers the vacant armchair beside the bookcase. Sirius sits as he realizes his hands are shaking. _What the hell are you going to tell me, what could have struck him silent after he’s already faced hell and a half to get this far?_

“It—the lycanthropy isn’t getting any worse, per say,” Basil says with a steady voice. Sirius feels a slipstream of relief coil into his veins, but he can’t look past how utterly done Remus looks. He ignores the instinct to feel quelled and can’t bring himself to say it—Sirius hopes his eyes can ask the question for him as he stares up at Basil. 

_Then what is?_

Basil whets his lips with a nervous dart of his tongue and sighs to himself, shaking his head in defeat to make the tens of tiny braid clasps woven into his hair tinkle slightly in the silence.

“He has lung cancer.”

Sirius blinks uselessly several times in the room’s stillness. His voice stumbles over his vocal cords to come out in a half-whisper when he finds it again; “What?”

“It’s advanced, it looks like it’s been there for years,” Basil explains gently, his words slightly fogged as Sirius’ ears begin to ring. “It might have been caught with a regular checkup at some point, but without the ability to see a doctor and such—”

“Basil, please.” Remus’ voice is raw, and Sirius stares at him, breath coming fast, to see hurt making a home in Remus’ features. “I don’t need to be reminded how stupid I’ve been to avoid medicine.”

Basil’s expression softens immediately. “You know I don’t mean to—”

“It’s fine,” Remus insists tightly. He still doesn’t draw his eyes up from the floor, and Sirius shakes his head in panicking disbelief. 

“No it’s not fine,” he rambles, “what the fuck do we do, Basil? We’re bloody wizards, there must be a cure.”

Sirius feels as though the room is spinning, time turning itself inside out in a retching pull of denial and facing the truth head-on. _He has lung cancer—_ cancer is only something Muggles have to worry about, Muggles and old wizards and witches who are beyond withstanding the strongest healing magic. Sirius stares at Basil with something that feels vaguely like accusation as he waits for the man to respond. 

“He’s an unregistered werewolf, Sirius, if he goes to Mungo’s he’ll be detained,” Basil says with a titch of difficulty. Sirius shakes his head again, bitterly, feeling the fact like a punch to the ribs. 

“Then another doctor, one of your colleagues, somebody must have the _fucking knowledge—”_

“Hush, Sirius,” Remus says softly, immediately cutting Sirius’ fury off at the neck. Sirius hadn’t realized he was beginning to shout. He pauses before he swipes a hand down his face and bites down on the edge of a trembling finger, one of his knees bouncing unconsciously as he tries to turn the situation over and over in his head. _What the fuck, what the fuck did he ever to do deserve this?_ he thinks wretchedly to himself. 

“Saint Mungo’s keeps their curative solutions ciphered,” Basil says on a disappointed sigh. “None if their practices can be mimicked outside of their facilities.”

“So nobody else has thought to look for a cure,” Sirius deadpans to the floor between his feet, not trusting himself to keep his emotions in check if he were to meet Basil’s or Remus’ eyes.

“Nobody else has needed to when they’ve been able to see a wizarding doctor for their entire life,” Remus says weakly. 

“Exactly,” Basil confirms with a sad tint to his tone. 

“Fuck,” Remus whispers to himself as his voice breaks, the first crack in his resolve that Sirius can sense. It does horrible things to the halls of Sirius’ heart. 

“What do we do?” Sirius demands, desperate, reaching for something that might fix the pieces of the future back where they should belong. He steels his will and looks up at Basil, grateful for the resilience staring back at him calmly. “There must be options for this sort of thing, there has to be.”

“There are other ways. Options,” Basil says with difficulty. Sirius’ stomach drops like a stone at the stuttering cadence with which Basil steers the conversation. “I’ve a colleague in Oxford who brews potions to...help. With the final hours. So one can plan for this sort of thing.”

Sirius’ heart twists up and around itself in a serpentine strike. “No,” he chokes out. Basil looks at him with sad sympathy in those eyes like polished chips of stone, his hair shuffling faintly with the movement. 

“If you’d prefer to—”

“It’s my choice.”

Basil cuts himself off at Remus’ weak interjection and they both look at the wounded man. Sorrow pulls at the lines of his face, but his glare is afire with resolve. “It’s my body, my life at stake here. It’s my choice,” Remus says again. “It’s a perfectly rational offer.”

Sirius’ mind begins to reel, unspooling even more quickly as he catalogues Remus sitting there—shoulders tight, right hand still tight in his lap, left arm hanging in its fresh sling, battered and tattered but looking angrier than sin itself in the face of such utter finality. 

“Remus, you can’t—“ Sirius starts, breathless, _Maybe we’ve both got it, has it ever been so hard to catch air before?_

“I can’t what?” Remus says immediately, “Control this? Of course I can. This is an option, Sirius, and one that we can’t ignore.” He looks back at Basil while Sirius tries to grasp the reality of Remus honestly weighing this as a bloody _option._ The ease with which Remus Lupin can remove his emotions from a situation is staggering.

It terrifies Sirius sometimes, how easily others can put away their pain. He has always feared the things he understands the least.

“It—the solution would be painless,” Basil says, stuttering slightly to be pinned with Remus’ scalpel-sharp and wordless inquisition. “It’s a hyper-distilled wolfsbane brew. I know of just a few others with your affliction who have used this when push came to shove, but I know it to be much more preferable to natural causes.”

“Bollocks to ‘natural causes,’ you said it yourself that this is cancer and not the wolf,” Sirius blurts as he feels his heart rend around the word _Preferable._

“The issues go hand-in-hand where mortality is concerned,” Basil says gently. Sirius fights to even his breathing as he stares at the woodgrain on the floor and puts his head in his hands, elbows propped on his knees. _Keep it together, Black, you’ve gotten through worse._ But has he really though? Has anything ever shattered the earth more violently than the impending and certain end of the only life that has ever made this whole bloody affair of _living_ worth it?

“I don’t like it either,” Remus finally says, “but it’s something valid to consider.” His voice sounds rough around its edges like a clamshell, whorled and layered. Sirius can’t think of any response that isn’t just baseless shouting, so he keeps his mouth shut.

“Think on it then, you know how to reach me if you have any questions,” Basil says as he stands steadily. “I’m so sorry. Truly. Both of you.”

“Thank you, Basil.” Remus’ murmured response stumbles and misses its finish line by several strides. 

“Be well.” The broad man takes his leave, thankfully not pressing a hand to either of their shoulders in comfort. Sirius doesn’t trust himself to not instinctually bite someone with the jumpy concoction of grief and fury racketing through his blood. _Be Well_ hangs stiffly in the room, a billow of decay with nowhere to go. 

The fireplace flutters mutely from the sitting room with Basil’s exit while Sirius and Remus remain sitting, stricken silent and motionless, in the office. _Fucking more like a morgue,_ Sirius’ bitter and spiraling inner voice fumes. 

“Talk to me,” Remus finally bids. Sirius looks up at him to see he hasn’t moved an inch, but his gaze is bright with clashing emotions. 

“You can’t really be considering it, Remus,” Sirius pleads. “Please, you don’t know how much time you even have left—“

“We’ve three weeks until the next moon, I know exactly how much time I have left.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“It’s what _I_ mean.”

Sirius stares at him in torn disbelief. “You’re not going to kill yourself, Rem.”

Remus holds his look for several seconds like the thickening air on the cusp of a thunderstorm before he stands up and moves to leave. Sirius’ guts flare with indignation as he clatters to his feet to follow him, quickly catching up when they reach the kitchen. 

“Remus.” Sirius stands several paces away from the man, the name heavy on his tongue as Remus turns to face him with with a fraught expression.

“What do you want me to tell you,” Remus says, waving his good hand aimlessly, “that I’m not going to consider it? I haven’t made a habit of lying to you, Sirius, I don’t plan on starting now.”

“Why would you do that?” Sirius asks, desperate, feeling the incessant urge to cry prickling at the back of this throat like mercury.

Remus shakes his head to himself and worries at his bottom lip with the corner of his teeth. “There are so many things at work here, Sirius—“

“Is it that difficult to fight one more battle? For me, for us, this is for _both_ of us—“

“That’s incredibly selfish,” Remus breathes, and Sirius flinches as he feels the walls fly up like ramparts inside that beautiful, ailing, breaking body.

“Then call me selfish,” he growls. He tries to quell the anger in him, meant for the incorporeal bitch that is Remus’ illness but accidentally aiming for Remus instead with the fury of the moment. 

“Why won’t you trust me?” Remus demands, his face twitching with pure sorrow for an instant before hardened frustration replaces it. “I need to t—”

“You are not going to _kill yourself,_ Remus,” Sirius interrupts him, voice raised, speaking slowly, annunciating around every word as the sentence burns more painfully on his tongue with each syllable. 

Remus’ eyes spark with tattered passion. “This isn’t your decision.”

“No, it isn’t, thanks for the reminder that I’m fucking rudderless here. You are _not. Going. To kill yourself.”_

“Would you rather me lose a limb next month, then? Because at this rate it’s what’s liable to happen,” Remus snarls. “My wrist is fractured, I’m going blind in one eye, I choke on my own air more often than not, what would _you_ want to do in this situation, Sirius? I’m really fucking curious!”

“I wouldn’t give up!” Sirius cries. Remus stares at him for a moment in silence before he sighs, a withered tremor of disappointment that twists around Sirius’ insides like a fist. 

“It isn’t giving up, don’t say that,” Remus hisses. 

“Of course it is,” Sirius spits, “you’re telling me that dying ahead of schedule isn’t the easy way out?”

“And what part of me leaving would be ‘easy?’” Remus demands, frown hard and stance defiant. Sirius’ nostrils flare with resistance.

“I didn’t say that, Remus, I’m saying I’m not ready to accept that you would stop trying!”

“Trying _what,_ Sirius?”

“Trying to outlive it!” Sirius shouts as he gestures widely with maddened hurt. “If you kill yourself, the fucking wolf wins!”

“Oh come off it, I tried it once already in year four!” Remus snaps immediately, before he stutters with the visible and delayed strain of ripping open old wounds.

Sirius freezes. His breath leaves him like a bullet punching through his chest.

Remus clenches his teeth and huffs out a quick, angry sigh. “I was home for a moon and it didn’t go well,” he continues through Sirius’ dumbfounded silence, “I took a bottle of pills from my mum’s medicine cabinet. I only got sick, it didn’t work, mum thought it was just the moon but da knew something was off. He cried, blamed himself. I didn’t have the heart to try it again after that.”

Remus’ voice runs out of fuel halfway through his explanation, running on fumes by the time he pauses for breath. He eases himself to sit in the chair he’d been gripping like a cane to continue, and the wood creaks slightly as Sirius can only stare; “Then we—the Animagus spells worked, and you and I started up, and you made it easier to forget that I ever wanted to do it in the first place.” His anger has ebbed but his jaw still flexes and his hands tense unconsciously. “But please don’t ever presume to say you know my own propensities more deeply than I do, Sirius. I love you, but you can never physically, _truly_ understand what this curse has done to me.”

Remus’ voice breaks on his last several words, but he holds himself together and looks exhausted by the unloaded weight of his admission. Sirius feels a couple of the tears building at the rims of his own eyes trip over his lower lashes and dash down his cheeks, quick and warm as though they’ll stick if they remain too long—eager to leave his body, the way it feels like his heart is trying to at the moment. He blinks quickly to clear the blur from his vision and swallows around the ball of hot iron in his throat. 

“Why have you kept that from me?” He asks with difficulty. Remus looks away from him and shakes his head. 

“You’ve had enough on your plate.”

“Merlin fucked, Remus, I don’t _care—“_ Sirius closes his eyes and takes a deep breath to stifle another wave of emotion and the truth that doesn’t need to be aired right now— _I don’t care a bloody inch about ‘my plate’ unless you’re on it._ “I’m so sorry.”

“So am I,” Remus murmurs.

Sirius kneels and pulls Remus into a tight embrace, the mercurial permanence of their clashing personalities melting off as Sirius buries his face in Remus’ neck. Remus responds with a shaky inhale and redoubles his own hold on Sirius. 

“I’m so scared,” Sirius manages to whisper as emotion surges once again, thick and boiling, into the avenues of his heart.

“It’s alright,” Remus murmurs, “I’m still here. I’ve got you.”

—

Sirius spends that night on the couch for the first time outside of an approaching moon in the decade he and Remus have had the flat. 

They’re having a row at the most inopportune time to have a row, and Sirius despises himself for it. 

In the morning, fuzzy with grief as he forces himself awake and into the bath to prepare for a day at the garage, Sirius revisits the outburst right before bed in the coal-hot memory that still smolders at the forefront of his mind. 

_Remus, let’s talk about this again._ Sirius had stood by the hearth, worrying the sleeve of his jumper between his fingers like a talisman as he watched Remus sigh and remove his glasses like a disappointed professor.

_I thought we already put this to bed._

_Put it to—? No._ Sirius scoffed and immediately knew it was the wrong thing to do; Remus’ face had gone icy, his eyes narrowing instantly in the face of it. _No, Rem, I’m not done discussing this._

_There’s nothing to ‘discuss.’ It’s my call to make._

_We both have a stake in this—_

_Do you think it’s that simple?_ Remus stood and advanced on Sirius, his lame arm somehow making the image of his defiance more gut-wrenching, and Sirius winces in the present to recall the way his eyes had welled up with rare vulnerability. _I had to watch my mother go through this exact same thing, and you would have to face that. That hell I had to see her through for_ eight fucking years, _Sirius, I’m not going to make you do that!_

_Stop assuming I can’t handle your tragedies!_ Sirius had shouted, exhausted and gutted and so completely tired of losing. He tore his ring from his finger and held it up between the two of them like red-handed evidence— _I chose this when I got us these rings, I consented to all of this awful FUCKING splendor, Remus!_

_Do you hear yourself sometimes, Sirius? You’re so bloody selfish, you always have been—_

_Are we digging up the past now? Is that what it’s come to now? Because I can play at that until I turn to fucking dust!_ Sirius’ throat had clenched when Remus’ eyes flashed at that.

_At least you have the time to get there,_ he had hissed, twisting the knife and knowing very well what he was doing. 

“Stop it,” Sirius says aloud to himself, to nobody, to the echoing drip of the faucet, muffled into the towel paused over his face as he dries himself off. His photographic recall is caustic sometimes with its accuracy for the more hurtful turns of happenstance.

He has a job to do. A very mundane job at which he is exceedingly good, which will help him forget how little he slept last night with the need for inner peace rattling his insides to the core of the earth and back.

Sirius dresses in yesterday’s jeans and an old shirt left in the spare room’s closet, not wanting to enter the bedroom shut tight after Remus had slammed it furiously last night— _I know what I’m doing, Sirius, and it’s final. Goodnight._

Cordiality to a fault has always been Remus’ weapon of choice, and when cornered he knows how to wield it with terrifying accuracy. 

Sirius rips the edge from a blank piece of parchment on Remus’ drafting table after he pulls the shirt over his head and summons a quill with a twitch of his fingers. _At work,_ he scratches out in tight script, _home by tea._ _I love you madly. Do what you feel is best, but please be patient with me. I’ve never been a quick study with grieving._

Jacket on, keys pocketed, hair up in a hasty knot; the weather mocks Sirius with perfect beauty when he steps out onto the street.

He makes his way to the garage on autopilot, thoughts nothing but the incessant ground hum of hurt. It feels distantly satisfying to make his body start to work as he unlocks and hauls up the heavy slatted door to bare the garage’s insides to the sunlight. Sirius is in before Mort as usual and, throwing open the hood of somebody’s ancient Capri to lean over the mechanism in a moment of lonely peace, lets himself cry. 

Sirius has never known why, out of all the places he‘s able to unload his emotions embarrassingly freely, the garage feels most comfortable. It was a haven when Regulus died, a place to come in early and mourn when he didn’t feel right letting it all go free at home in the uncertainty of his undefined relationship with Remus at the time. The ability to let anguish roll up like a rusty, muddied tide from his rioting depths feels less pathetic when he can pair it with wiping down the counters or tuning an engine. 

Sirius lets himself be ugly in these precious moments of depressive solitude, his face crumpled and blotchy and twisted with sorrow. His shoulders shake as he sobs and gives up to the stolid press of fortune. He must lose Remus Lupin. 

He must lose Remus Lupin, he must lose Remus Lupin, he must lose Remus Lupin, and perhaps if he repeats the thought to himself enough times it will just turn into noise and cease being real.

_“Fuck,”_ he weeps, slamming a closed fist in useless frustration on the side of the car and covering his eyes with one hand. The only syllable whole enough to capture the downward spiral and utter sadness of the past few months anymore is _Fuck,_ with its fricative introduction like an incendiary spell to end with a crack; the Killing Curse of consonants, trussing up the word like a garish green bow. 

Fuck. Fuck. _Fuck. FUCK._

Soon, the approach of an old engine that sounds like a tugboat rolling up to the back lot drags Sirius up out of his misery. He swipes roughly at his eyes with the back of his wrist and takes up a ratchet behind him, setting to the work of pretending to have been productive for the last half hour.

“Morning-morning,” Mort calls as he makes his way into the garage.

“Ta, morning,” Sirius replies, inwardly wincing at the muffled tightness in his voice from the heavy bout of tears. Thankfully the broad, cherry-red panel of the engine hood blocks him from Mort’s vision as the man makes his way around the waiting cars and piles of parts.

“Been in long?” Mort asks as he thumbs down the wide button to raise up the hydraulics under a rust-rinded coup one of their regular had bought for cheap last week as a restoration project. 

“Nah,” Sirius says through a sniff over the mechanical whine and groan of the moving carriage unit. He swipes at his eyes again and pulls on a pair of work gloves before he draws focus to tinker quite uselessly with the insides of the hood. The hydraulics grind to a stop and Mort heads toward Sirius to get hands on the tool bench behind him. Sirius stares fastidiously down at his hands, plunged into the comforting mouth of machinery and hoping against all hope that Mort wouldn’t glance his way. 

As ever, the universe ignores Sirius like a puppy yapping into the void. 

“Here, all’s well then?” Mort asks warily from Sirius’ left. Sirius stills his hands and sighs heavily to himself before he swallows thickly and shakes his head after another moment, staring at the flaking underbelly of the engine hood. 

“My flatmate’s gotten sick. Cancer,” Sirius says, stark and vaguely angry at even just the word—the cellular riot that could be cured if the Ministry would pull the iron rod out of its rotting minge for once, dangling just out of his reach like so many other scraps of happiness throughout his life. “Lung cancer.”

“Bollocks and hell,” Mort sighs sadly. “Got my mum when I was younger. He’s your age, yeah? Going to treat it?”

“He isn’t sure.” Sirius doubles down on ratcheting at the engine struts before him. If Mort catches the fevered desperation in the action, he has the grace not to comment on it. 

“Well, either way you fold it, it’s a blazing bastard of a thing. I’m sorry, Sirius.” 

“Me too.”

“Let me know if you ever need time off; take him to hospital, help with the daily, anything.”

“Thanks, Mort.” Sirius looks away to clear the second round of tears building in his eyes, and Mort nods to himself in commiseration before clapping Sirius paternally on the shoulder and heading back to the coup.

The rest of the morning bleeds steadily into afternoon while Sirius wars with his inner tendencies. He reaches back into some of his oldest memories, those gnarled roots wended to tightly together in such a madness of beautiful knots, to reexamine all the ways Remus had held himself at arm’s length since the very first day they met. 

Sirius knows he shouldn’t let himself be surprised by the way Remus views this decision. If he’d had to be the one offing himself— _Fuck, Sirius, don’t say it like that. Stop all this bloody inner violence._ If Sirius was the who had to die anytime soon, he knows Remus would adopt the same angle of pragmatism and, while Remus has never been an emotionless slate of a man, he would deal with it with a certain and unique sense of emotional inevitability. 

Sirius, not so much. He cries periodically throughout the afternoon until he rounds the hill of _It isn’t my choice_ with a graceless stumble and reluctant surrender to Fate and all things frustrating. 

It isn’t what Sirius would have planned, but it’s the hand he’s been dealt. If he’s going to be a man about this, he’s going to trust that the man he loves knows what he’s doing. 

It still hurts. He cries to himself as surreptitiously as possible on his walk home before ducking into an alleyway to transform into Padfoot and put off the painfully human feelings for a few minutes. 

It helps.

He arrives home far more clearheaded, panting slightly; ready to speak.

Sirius opens the front door to find Remus curled on the couch with a book in his lap. The tremor of adoration that blooms in his heart at the sight reminds him, with a shudder, of so many afternoons in which he’d taken the peaceful simplicity for granted—

_No. Stop it, Black, stop feeling sorry for yourself. He needs you._

Sirius squeezes his eyes shut briefly to dispel the pitch of self-pity that wants to roll up in his guts. He refuses to let his propensity for dramatics overtake him now. There will be more than enough time to wallow when Remus is gone.

“Oh,” Remus exclaims softly from the couch, starting a bit when Sirius shuts the door gently while he shucks off his boots and jacket. It’s such a delicate sound that Sirius can’t help but smile, a naked little _Oh,_ in the same vein as the sounds Remus makes when Sirius takes him by surprise with kisses to parts of his skin he wouldn’t have otherwise thought to have merited a kiss—his elbow, his sternum, the shell of his ear. 

“Oh,” Sirius apes back at him, tender, all tenderness now—if the last several hours in his own head had taught him anything at all, it’s that there’s too little time left to worry over the technicalities of treading carefully. All that matters is ardor.

“I didn’t think you would be back until tea,” Remus says as he twists to meet Sirius’ arrival over the back of the sofa, tensing with more soft surprise when Sirius catches him there in a deep kiss. He reaches up to hold Sirius’ cheek and stroke his thumb there, responding with weakened insistence.

“Nation-wide reschedule, hadn’t you heard?” Sirius murmurs when he pulls back. He searches the slopes of Remus’ face for a few indulgent moments— _Call me selfish, then._ “I wanted to be with you,” he amends as he stands up out of his lean and charms the kettle to boil with tidy yellow bolt from his wand. 

“Good, I—yes,” Remus says, almost to himself. He makes his way into the kitchen and sets out two teacups on the table while Sirius rakes his hair up into a fresh knot, and Sirius tries not to stare too longingly at the way he moves just a tick slower than normal. 

“Can we talk? About all of this? I feel awful, I—“ Sirius gives up on words and gestures muddily at the air in front of him. A flicker of a smile twitches onto Remus’ face as he sets the teacups on the table.

“Yes,” Remus says, sighs, pouring the water for both of them and settling in his place across from Sirius. “What’s got you, Pads?”

“Besides the obvious?” Sirius mutters aloud as he plops a sachet into each of their teacups, forgetting to say it to inwardly. His stomach drops at the slip, but he’s lucky that Remus only quirks another half-smile and reaches across the table to take Sirius’ hand in both of his own.

“Besides the obvious,” he affirms gently. 

Sirius sighs and drags the tie out of his hair with one tired finger, ruffling out the loose knots with a rake of his free hand. He thumbs lovingly at Remus’ clasping fingers but doesn’t look up at him— _can’t_ look up at him as he readies the words he’d been sitting on like eggs for the last several hours. 

“It’s—Look. I’ve not been very graceful about this whole letting go business, you know how hard it is for me not to control something important,” he starts. Sirius worries at his bottom lip between his teeth and bounces one knee shallowly beneath the table, nerves fluttering to life in his belly like tremors. “But I trust you. You know that.”

“I know,” Remus murmurs. In Sirius’ periphery he watches the man sip carefully from his teacup, still holding onto Sirius with his other hand.

“And this is, quite frankly, fucking awful,” Sirius continues starkly. He feels his insides clench as emotion begins boiling again behind his heart, but he blinks away the prickling sensation of tears to forge ahead. “I should have been preparing myself for this over the last several months, when you—we—when you had that moment. After Harry. When it got... _real,_ I dunno, Moony, once it reached the point where I knew it wasn’t going to just go away on its own but I didn’t want to admit that myself.”

Sirius feels his voice tremble so he steals the moment to breathe, even out his air and keep himself from dissolving again. 

“That makes two of us,” Remus says wryly. They both let silence hang for a moment, a bitter but pretty garland strung up between them. 

“But…you’re right,” Sirius says eventually. His words taste awkward, reluctance coating his tongue like salt as he muscles through the truth he mustered so carefully through the long stretch of morning. He soldiers on with effort, his voice a husk of worry; “I don’t want to keep arguing. I can’t do this avoidance shit anymore, I’m no good at it; I haven’t held the truth from you since before I told you I love you, Remus. I’m horrible at it. We have so little time left, this—it’s ruining me.”

“I’m sorry,” Remus murmurs. His grip tightens with fierce tenderness, warm through its inherent weakness. 

“None of this is your fault.”

Sirius’ words expand like swelling surf through the tiny kitchen, gaining the strength of invisible amplification through their necessity. The flat has never felt so small outside of the last twenty-four hours—what a fragile thing spacetime becomes in the face of grief. Sirius watches Remus’ shoulders relax unconsciously. 

“I got your note this morning. I apologize for shouting last night, and I just—I hope you know it wasn’t an easy choice, Sirius.” Remus stares at his tea, its lazy steam certainly easier to face than Sirius’ eyes writ deep with sleeplessness and uncertainty. He sweeps both thumbs across the back of Sirius’ hand in slow circles, the way he used to when they were boys and still discovering the wondrous sparks of idle touch. Remus sighs thinly to himself. “It _isn’t_ an easy choice.”

“You can’t handle another transformation. It wouldn’t be fair, I can’t ask you to go through a moon again,” Sirius says gently, halfway to convince his sorry heart that either way this gavel could have fallen would crack his life in two.

Remus sags with relief and stands to gather Sirius into a haphazard embrace, squeezing him as tightly as one good arm will allow while Sirius catches him close and buries his face in Remus’ curls. “You know what’s best,” Sirius rasps. 

“I love you, I adore you, you fantastic disaster, I’m so sorry,” Remus rambles into the side of Sirius’ neck. 

“Me, too.”

They stand for a long time, pressed together and emptied of too many sodding tears across the past few days to have anymore left to cry now. Remus clings as though he might slide to pieces if he lets go, and so Sirius holds him just as dearly. He closes his eyes and breathes in the unforgettable cinnamon-tinged scent of Remus’ sandy hair with quiet hunger, sating his breaking heart on the memory of so many evenings spent doing the same thing in blissful peace.

“We have to tell James and Lily and Pete something to cover,” Remus murmurs eventually. “I don’t—I don’t want them to know I’ve chosen this. They have to think it was natural.”

Sirius insides tug reluctantly, but he nods. The eternal serpent in his blood rears up and strikes violently at his spirit for rolling over like this, letting the dark creature have its way, losing the only battle worth fighting—infused with the unique strength of resignation, Sirius does the bravest thing he’s done in years and simply ignores the venom.

“Alright,” he sighs. 

_Alright, alright, alright._ So much of Sirius’ time has been spent convincing himself of that vapid untruth. He thinks fondly of the time that he has now—precious little, but time nonetheless—to spend on enjoying what’s left of Remus’ existence instead of pretending that hell has frozen over.

—

Sirius manages to steal several days away from the garage with Mort’s understanding blooming healthily in the spaces left by Sirius’ inability to articulate exactly why he can’t bring himself to orbit very far away from Remus anymore. Remus reads while Sirius organizes the flat out of sheer habit, or pops out for the world’s fastest grocery runs— _Lord, it’s like your heels are on fire;_ Remus so quick to return to his default cool-headedness while Sirius wishes intensely for such a gift in the face of disaster.

Peace feels like broken glass underfoot, and yet he must walk.

One afternoon as the coming moon looms only days away, Sirius returns from a stop at the grocer to see Remus’ shoulders tenser than he left them, leaning over a letter with a very official-looking blue quill and a weak set to his jaw.

“Ta,” Sirius announces in a try for normalcy. “Who’s the lucky sod that gets the letter?”

“Minerva. She has to know, I’m writing to inform her of a leave of sickness” Remus says, pointed and jagged like cut glass. Sirius flinches with the smack of reality he hadn’t wanted to address today.

“I—is she going to be alright with that? What will happen when you—when it’s all said and done?”

“I’ve prepared another message that Central Post is going to deliver automatically in the future.”

“Merlin, Remus, that’s all a bit heavy to be handled by post alone, don’t you think?”

“She’ll understand, Sirius, since when has Minerva ever put emotions before logic?”

“You’ve learned well from her,” Sirius says without thinking. His throat catches with regret when Remus’ mouth tightens at its corners, but the man ignores the slight and moves on to change the subject tidily. 

“Basil delivered the solution.” Remus’ voice is flat but the tremor of apprehension in it is undeniable. That instinctual shying away from finality, afraid to approach it head-on; James is the stag, but it feels like they’re all deer in the headlamps lately. Shaken, afraid, blind in the glare of mortality’s angry beams. It might be novel if it weren’t so fucking sad. 

“What—how does it work?” Sirius breathes.

Remus bites his lips together for a moment as he dusts the parchment to dry his ink. “He said it will be like taking a sleep aid, a one sip dosage that will pull me under. Not unlike the potion I had to take for insomnia in year four.”

_Except this time you won’t bloody wake up._ “When,” Sirius says roughly, halfway to cover his inner monologue. The word hangs in the air like stale musk with its own silence. Remus moves the pad of his thumb along his quill’s edge, the feather furling across his skin with a whisper that Sirius feels in his veins rather than hears. 

“The night before the moon, to make it seem natural from the outside. Three days,” Remus murmurs. Sirius looks over at the clock on the wall as if the square, midcentury piece had the ability to stay the hammering that mounts in the roaring fog of his ears at the date’s suddenness.

“Are you going to tell your father?” Sirius asks. He’s surprised he can still breathe. Remus nods. 

“I’m going over there tomorrow. I owe him as much.”

Sirius’ heart aches for Lyall in that moment, the man who has had to feel the burrow of loss far more than should be allowed in one lifetime. “I suppose it would be worse to make him assume it was the curse,” Sirius says aimlessly. 

“Exactly.” Remus’ voice expels the collection of consonants as though he’s spitting bitter pebbles.

Sirius stands with one of the paper grocery bags still hanging sadly in his hand, awkward and stark in the kitchen, before Remus stands up steadily and takes it from him with a kiss to his temple. “Thank you for stopping out at the store,” Remus murmurs around a gravelly catch in his lungs.

Sirius thumbs at the man’s lower lip and puts on his most convincing half-smile. “Anything for you, love.”

The evening passes coolly—a calm dinner, Remus to bed early as he coughs his way to sleep and Sirius tries his hardest not to listen through the wall. The next morning is rain and more rain, and Remus eyes it warily through the window as he pulls on his jacket to step into the hearth. “I don’t know when I’ll be back,” he sighs, “Da didn’t say anything but ‘Be round for breakfast then.’”

“Take your time,” Sirius assures him tenderly. He watches like a sentinel as Remus coughs heartily in his fist and clears his throat with a sound that feels like scraping rust. Sirius manages not to tighten the fingers resting on Remus’ lapel.

“See you later then, try not to burn down the flat. Be good.” Remus kisses Sirius succinctly, sweetly, the sort of kiss that tastes like springtime and has no place amidst the knowledge that Remus will be gone in little more than 48 hours.

_Stop fucking thinking about it like that._

“I’ll do my best,” Sirius promises him, stealing another kiss before he’s out the Floo in a puff of green fire and a waft of ash.

Patently, Sirius looks away from the allegory of white and sooty offal at his feet and fixes a heavily-spiked mug of tea instead.

The morning trudges like a squared wheel in mud, and Sirius wishes distantly for it to quit raining so he might go to the garage and waste a few hours with his hands twisting at machine parts. He tries once to smoke just after tea, but with the first drag his mind can only fixate on grotesque mental images of rotting lungs and cancerous clots of blackened flesh.

He stubs out the near-pristine roll and chucks his packet of papers into the bin under the sink without a second thought.

When the hearth flares at a quarter to three o’clock, Sirius shoots up from the couch to see Remus materialize there like a beacon. His eyes are raw, ringed with dark red and purpled circles beneath, and his nose and cheeks are flushed with grief. For the first time, Remus Lupin looks the part of one due to be dying soon.

“How did he take it?” Sirius asks as he rushes forward to bundle the man into a saving embrace right where he stands. Remus returns the clasp with both arms, his hands trembling vaguely with the afterburn of preemptive mourning.

“As you might expect,” Remus says into his shoulder. His voice is raw, like a tree shucked of its bark. “He wants you to go see him when you’re ready, when it—whenever both of you feel ready, afterwards. However long that ends up being.”

“I’ll owl him soon,” Sirius murmurs. He doesn’t pry, but he can feel the weight of pain in the way Remus presses himself into Sirius’ comforting presence. “Promise.”

They stay standing for a few seconds before, mantle assumed as ever, Remus wipes calmly at his eyes and shrugs off his jacket onto the back of the armchair with ginger attention. He picks up the book left splayed in a poor man’s bookmark over the seat of the chair and sits, curling his feet up toward himself with a quiet, steady sigh. Even such forlorn serenity looks well on him; leave it to Remus Lupin to make grief seem suave by accident.

“We’ve two days, Remus,” Sirius says carefully, still standing, still not believing the sound of the words he speaks. “Do you want to do anything special? I—we could go somewhere.”

Remus looks up at him and smiles sadly. “Honestly, love, haven’t we had enough of hiding?”

Sirius says nothing as he folds himself into a sit at Remus’ feet and rests his cheek against the other man’s knees. Remus is right. He‘s always right, no matter how infuriating that had been as boys. They had hidden from one another’s feelings for years until that levee broke, and then they all had to hide from the terror of greater extremism. After that they had hidden from grief, from change, from the hard smack of the present screaming at them that _This is what happens when you grow up, you lose too many things to keep apace._ Loss has never been exclusive. Hiding from it all has been a lifelong marathon—if Sirius is tired of it in retrospect, he can hardly imagine how deeply it’s drained Remus all along.

“We have,” Sirius murmurs. He presses an indolent kiss to Remus’ leg and holds him there, closing his eyes when Remus buries his fingers in Sirius’ hair to make idle patterns on his scalp. 

“Put on a record,” Remus suggests, his voice easy. Sirius draws his wand from his back pocket without looking and blindly charms one of the albums onto the turntable. The two sit quietly as the needle fizzes for several seconds, absorbing the stillness like sunlight. Sirius’ insides clench madly when the first track starts up. 

_“Don't cry, don't cry baby,  
_ _Don't cry baby;  
_ _Dry your eyes, and let's be sweethearts again...”_

“Bloody fucking Etta,” Sirius growls, burying his face in Remus‘ knee.

“She’s right, you know,” Remus says with the hint of a smile in his voice.

“I’ll cry all I want, I won’t have some uppity American tart with a microphone tell me what to do,” Sirius says petulantly into the fabric of Remus’ trousers. Remus chuckles, blessedly, and ruffles Sirius’ hair where his hand rests. He hums along with the track, his voice a roughened murmuration, and Sirius does his best to sear the moment into his mind with something that almost feels like a prayer. 

_“C'mon, c'mon sweetheart,  
_ _And let's try it over again...”_

—

The morning of the last day of Remus Lupin’s life feels absolutely, comfortably, terrifyingly normal. The shroud Sirius had expected to hang over them with the knowledge of finality disappears the second he opens his eyes to see Remus just barely coming into waking beside him.

_I would brave the Styx and everything in between for this man twelve times over for the luck of my life with him,_ his half-dreaming thoughts whisper from the cathedral caverns of his heart. Sirius draws a tender thumb over the old scar that catches the top corner of Remus’ lip, smiling sleep-drunk to himself, and presses a soft kiss to it.

“Morning,” he murmurs as Remus crinkles his nose and stirs.

“Aye,” Remus groans. “Just—bit longer, love.”

“I’ll make tea,” Sirius whispers, peppering Remus with more fluttering little kisses as he rises from the bed. As he shifts to sprawl and take up the vacant side of the bed now, Remus makes little sounds of approval that almost cover the scrape of air in his ailing lungs.

So Sirius makes tea. Remus wakes soon and they share it in the kitchen. Hardly either of them speaks the whole morning through. To Remus’ credit, he looks thoroughly rested.

All afternoon Sirius hovers near, in constant orbit to Remus’ quiet existence, the outlier planet that can sense its eclipse nearing around the next elliptical curve but can do nothing to stave it off. They talk about little inanities, Remus’ remarks sweet for his favorite little pieces of the flat— _I’ve always loved that sloping little shelf; Remember to keep those old cameos from my grandmother polished, they’ll get catty if you don’t._ Amidst it all, Sirius touches Remus often as if his fingerprints might help cement the memories. He needs to feel all the warmth he possibly can. 

The sun fades slowly, agonizingly slowly through its golden westerly arc to paint the sitting room with stillness. Sirius pretends to read on the opposite end of the sofa while he stares at Remus devouring his last dose of Baudelaire. 

“What are you reading?” Sirius hazards gently. Routine tastes like nails at this point. Remus looks up and smiles as if he weren’t about to fade in a matter of hours. 

“My mother’s old favorite,” he says, paper-thin, the flutter of damselfly wings. “‘Meditation.’”

“Read to me,” Sirius murmurs. His hand is at Remus’ ankle and he traces the angular shape of it—warm with life, peppered with his light brown hair, vaguely freckled if one looked close enough. Sirius has always looked close enough. 

Remus smiles at him again and smooths the edge of the page; _“Sois sage, ô ma Douleur, et—”_

“In English,” Sirius interjects gently. “Please.”

“Had enough of your sordid past?” Remus chides him with quiet playfulness, toeing him with the foot by Sirius’ hand, and casts him a brief and glittering look of adoration. Sirius’ heart shudders. 

“Please,” he repeats, his fingers tightening unconsciously against Remus’ skin. He swallows down the threat of grief as Remus’ eyes soften before he relents to the request. 

_“Be quiet and more discreet, O my Grief.  
_ _You cried out for the Evening; even now it falls:  
_ _A gloomy atmosphere envelops the city,  
_ _Bringing peace to some, anxiety to others.  
_ _While the vulgar herd of mortals, under the scourge  
_ _Of Pleasure, that merciless torturer,  
_ _Goes to gather remorse in the servile festival,  
_ _My Grief, give me your hand; come this way  
_ _Far from them. See the dead years in old-fashioned gowns  
_ _Lean over the balconies of heaven;  
_ _Smiling Regret rise from the depths of the waters;  
_ _The dying Sun fall asleep beneath an arch, and  
_ _Listen, darling, to the soft footfalls of the Night  
_ _That trails off to the East like a long winding-sheet.”_

Sirius lets his eyes stay closed for several long seconds after Remus finishes and lets his voice ring through his skull like a bell tower. Eventually he opens them again, to see Remus watching him calmly. 

“I’m never going to be able to read any of your books without hearing them in your voice,” Sirius admits. Remus quirks a sad smile. 

“Keen to start new habits after a decade of turning up your nose at them? You wound me, love,” he teases gently. Sirius clenches his jaw down to hold in the pitching mix of sorrow and ardor that rumbles invisibly through his chest. He can’t think of anything witty to say. He keeps his eyes locked on Remus’ in the wordless dialect of adoration.

After several moments longer, Remus shuts his book and rests it on the floor. He holds open his arms to signal for Sirius to come fill them, and Sirius obliges with magnetic, catching need.

“Seeing as we’re entrenched now in such ‘vulgar’ mortality,” Remus hums into Sirius’ hair before pressing a long kiss to the crown of his head, “what say you to letting Pleasure torture us both one more time?”

Sirius squeezes his eyes shut again for a second to weather the iron punch of reality in Remus’ words—One More Time. He tightens his arms around Remus’ waist, curling closer, holding just desperately enough not to cause him a coughing fit but with the depth of need to communicate this immediacy. 

“Please,” Sirius finally manages to whisper. His breath on Remus’ collarbone ebbs back him like a pulling tide. Remus’ careful fingers at his chin, tipping it up to kiss him, almost burn with their warmth. It feels impossible to think he’s almost gone. 

Sirius just wants to quit _thinking_ for a blessed stretch of madness.

He responds with stirring enthusiasm, and the two of them coil into a haven of kisses. Sirius buries his hands in Remus’ hair to feel the strands part across his fingertips at the base of Remus’ skull, spun gold if there was such room for the comparison. They press near to one another, the arrangement of their limbs on this couch for moments like this so second-nature by now that Sirius knows just where to unfold his legs, just how how to lean his dive into the open devotion that Remus offers. He tastes of black tea and a hint of mint. He tastes of the history between two boys who barely knew anything but the tug of their own heartstrings. He tastes of life.

“To bed,” Remus breathes eventually as Sirius eases a hand to the gap of skin at his rising shirt hem, “I want—to take you to bed.”

“You can take me right here,” Sirius replies against the skin of Remus’ neck, the swan-like highway of blood and bone that curves so perfectly as he turns now to arch it subtly with approval at the way Sirius traces his naked chest. He doesn’t want to lose Remus in the dark of the bedroom by giving him the chance to douse their bedside lamp and let the room’s lone window feed his vision with nothing but rising, looming moonlight. Sirius wants the healthy yellow glow of the sitting room, he wants the fade of daytime outside to have its last glimpse of them together in their most fluent language of physicality. He wants to see every inch of Remus’ body blushing and tensing and releasing beneath and above him. He wants to take it all in, take it all, whether on the floor or on the sofa or somewhere in between. He just _wants_.

Remus sighs with approval that makes his hands tremble sweetly where they ball up the back of Sirius’ shirt. Sirius pulls it off for him with one hand by the back of his collar, muddling his vision for a moment once it’s off with the black net of his hair skewing over his eyes. Remus combs it back to bring him close again, and Sirius catches the pleasure rolling off of Remus like steam before he drowns himself once more against his lips. 

Soon, Sirius finds himself sliding his way steadily to his knees. He kisses the whole way down over scarred skin laid bare by simply pushing up the bottom of Remus’ jumper. “I love you,” he murmurs in a languorous pause against the rapid rise and fall of Remus’ diaphragm. His voice feels hot as it comes out, his vocal cords sunburnt by spilling painful truths for the last several weeks. “I love you so bloody dearly, Remus.”

“I love _you,”_ Remus echoes. Sirius does his best not to let his fingers flex in their hold on Remus’ hips when he hears the scrape of disrepair in the breath around those words. 

“How do you want it,” Sirius says quickly, trampling over the errant thoughts of finality, “how do you want me?”

He looks up from his place on his knees before Remus, the place he’s always preferred above anywhere else on this ragged fucking earth. He feels the pit of his guts twinge sharply with arousal amidst the host of other flurrying emotions when Remus drags a tender thumb along the seam between Sirius’ lips. Without thinking, Sirius pushes out his tongue to meet it and bites down lightly on the pad of the finger. He feels Remus respond to the motion with a surge in his trousers and a catch of his own lower lip between his own teeth. Sirius could stare at a portrait if this undoing for the rest of his life. 

“Fuck me,” Remus pleads hoarsely; “gently, angrily, slowly, what have you, whatever you want—I just—I need you.”

“And I you,” Sirius assures him in a whisper. The rolling boil of need within him snarls with resurgence, overtaking the sadness, as he returns to Remus’ body with searching lips—down to the hem of his jeans, down beyond the removal of his pants, down to his cock that throbs just as readily and beads clear at its tip when Sirius licks it slowly. 

“I’m going to make it sweet then,” Sirius grates. “I’m going to make you want it so badly and I’m going to take such careful time with it that you’re going to finish so hard you see _silver_ when I decide you’re ready.”

Sirius isn’t sure if his sudden and quiet fury is directed at himself or the impending disaster of the night, but then Remus makes a helpless sound of encouragement at the gentle taunt and clenches a fist in Sirius’ hair. Sirius needs no other sign to shut off his fucking mind and continue. 

He’s everywhere at once in encompassing, maddening attention across Remus’ body, touching him everywhere with deliciously deliberate but-not-quite-enough presence to string him out as slowly as Sirius wants this to last. If this is to be the final time, it needs to be _perfect_ —Sirius grits his teeth and nearly growls at himself to quiet that invasive bloody thought as he presses a kiss to the inside of Remus’ thigh and moves his thumb in slow circles at the very base of Remus’ cock. 

“You’re so beautiful,” Sirius breathes. He crooks the two fingers moving slowly in and out of Remus—trained slowness, patient slowness underscored with the riotous craving to make Remus spend right then and there—and watches hungrily as Remus spasms in response with the particularly targeted movement. “I adore unwinding you like this.”

“Takes one to— _fuck_ —to know one,” Remus gasps. Sirius curves his fingers again in the same spot, indolently, and draws them out slowly through Remus’ following tumble of soft curses as the ecstasy is taken over at its heels by absence. Sirius charms his fingers clean of their slicking spells and stands up to remove his trouser and pants before he re-situates himself on the couch, drawing a hand warmly down the flank of Remus’ bare thigh. 

“Are you still alright, love?”

“Yes.”

“I—can get back to it with my mouth if you—“

“Sirius, I know what I asked for. I want this, now, this the request of a d—“

Sirius doesn’t let him finish the sentence, not ready in slightest yet to hear Remus utter the words that were most probably going to be _Dying Man;_ he smothers the moment with another kiss. His own stiffened length touches against Remus’ and he groans low against Remus’ mouth. ”I would hand you the world if you requested it, Remus,” he breathes.

“You maddening berk,” Remus replies, the half-smile behind the dredged-up words evident in the sound of his voice, his breathing labored but _Oh Merlin alive, don’t say it, don’t make me cry with my cock out,_ “you _are_ the world.”

Sirius’ resolve rattles mightily at his core, but he holds fast to it and doesn’t allow his eyes to well up from where he fixes his gaze onto Remus’ like fresh fletching. Those green eyes shine brightly, the lunar acuity exacting amid the fogginess of pulsing arousal and too many feelings at once. He pulls Remus up carefully to sit up, draws him nearer, and carries them both away into cantering, jagged bliss.

He tries to make it last as long as possible, but Sirius had known that the moment he crossed the threshold into actively fucking Remus he’d be as good as gone. Several minutes pass in honeyed, suspended perfection before Remus’ breath catches on its telltale final string.

“Don’t stop,” he pleads, his voice split like a cracked reed, head thrown back alongside the ruffled cushions, jumper askew, debauched, looking like every dream of him Sirius had suffered through sweetly in his dormitory when he was 16 and stumbling; “don’t—oh, God, Sirius, I’m going to come—”

Remus inhales sharply as Sirius rolls his hips forward and takes one of Remus’ earlobes between his teeth. “Do it,” he intones, his own voice feathered with finality. He feels himself approaching that apex as well, and he wants to force his own hand as perfectly as possible.

Sirius feels Remus tense as his thread snaps, crying out around a gasp with rusty release while he pulses several times to spill across his stomach. Sirius watches him unfurl, blooming and dying in the span of seconds like a river flower, and ignores the sharp spear of distress as he crests his own point of no return.

_“Remus,”_ he invokes, entreats, the name less of a name and far more of a broken blessing on this union that will never come to pass again. Sirius grips Remus’ thighs as he comes hard, his entire core twitching with the effort, listening to Remus try his best to steady his breathing without the rattle as they both come back down from the heights of brief and shuddering glory.

Sirius doesn’t bother with a cleansing charm for several minutes, choosing instead to curl up at Remus’ side and breath both of them in while their hearts quit hammering and Sirius’ mind continues racing apace. Remus is the one to break the hallowed silence eventually.

“I think we should pour us some drinks,” he says carefully. Sirius fights the tidal wave that rises in his throat to know his time is running out. He feels the present rattle through his body, rousting the small bones of courage like an army summoned to the carrion field it does not want to tread in the dawn of certain defeat. If he listens, he can hear the partials of terror ringing distantly. _Do not give me all this grace, Remus,_ he thinks to himself, even as he nods into the shoulder of the man he loves more than breath on this introduction of his twilight hours. _Do not make me say goodbye before I can give you the universe._

But as he realizes it, Sirius is already given over. They both are, have been now since they agreed this was the only option.

Sirius Black draws a tremor of a breath and commits to the last evening in which he will ever feel whole again. 

—

Remus pours two glasses of wine, deep pours so near to the look of blood that Sirius swallows his first draught of it in a gulp of a clumsy mouthful to make him quit thinking about all things death and doom. The fireplace crackles before them, Floo sealed tight and front door locked, couched in a nest made of every single one of their blankets pulled from around the flat in a whirl of desperation for loveliness. Sirius sits back against the foot of the sofa, Remus leans back against his chest the way he has whenever they would let themselves have quiet nights in throughout the years. 

Sirius hates to know that it will all come to a close tonight.

He lets Remus do most of the talking. 

“Remember the first time you all got me stark drunk?” Remus asks around the edges of a smile, and Sirius can’t help the twitch of his own on his lips at the memory. 

“‘Quit studying, what the fuck ever are you going to use a Potions NEWT for, Moony?’” Sirius jokes gently in a doofy mimicry of a 5th-year James. 

Remus chuckles to himself through a sip of wine. “I almost kissed you that night,” he recalls warmly. 

“Don’t I fucking know it,” Sirius snorts at the memory of his younger self—thrall to the nearness of Remus in the common room, heart aching like the flex of a windowpane as Remus had swayed close in their sit on the floor to pin him with accidental bedroom eyes and declare with a gentle slur _Messire Black, I think you need a haircut._ His exploratory fingers diving then into Sirius’ skewed fall of hair had been enough to light Sirius up from core to fingertips like the burst of a firework. “Quite a discovery, that, to find that I really, _really_ liked your hands in my hair.” He had taken to thought of the moment to bed with him in his left hand for months. 

As Remus laughs, Sirius punishes himself with another long sip of wine for speaking about their togetherness in past tense. _He isn’t even gone yet, you fuck._

Remus sighs contentedly to himself and nestles himself into Sirius’ chest. “I should have spent a lot more time kissing you back then,” he murmurs. 

“We would have failed every class, Moony.” Sirius nudges him with a knee and chuckles through his words. It feels genuine, vaguely painful; he clings to the sensation like oxygen. 

“You certainly didn’t need the help,” Remus teases him. Sirius toes at Remus’ ankle.

“Ta, glad to know you had so much faith in me.”

“Oh please, you’ve always been more than academics,” Remus soothes. Sirius’ heart flexes tenderly as he kisses Remus’ shoulder with slow indolence. He will miss this. He will miss this immensely.

They weave the past in the air before them for hours, until the sun goes golden-gone and the wine goes dry. The fireplace falls to naught but embers and yet they continue feeding the billow of memories as if the minutes could be staved off by nothing but reminiscence and the eternal surge of love. Sirius laughs and cries both to himself and out loud, his arms drawing Remus close and ever closer, until the two outlets run together like ink in water and he can’t tell where one starts and the other ends. 

Remus is the first one to break a long and meditative stillness that takes them over just past nine o’clock, both men clinging to one another like planks in the ocean. 

“I always expected it to be the curse that ended it all,” he nearly whispers. “Ironic, really, that it’s the human side that‘s done me in.”

Sirius judiciously says nothing and swipes silently at his eyes. Neither he nor Remus comments on the break in his voice when he speaks; “Your human side is your _whole_ side, Rem. Always has been.”

Remus squeezes Sirius’ hand with gentle gratitude and swallows thickly. The fire pops several times in the silence between them for several seconds. “I could have become nothing but a creature, Sirius,” he says eventually. “Everything I’ve read about the whole of us, every werewolf eventually goes Dark; kills someone, changes someone, whatever might be worse between the two. You kept me away from that.”

Remus’ words fog with his own grief as he finishes his thought, and Sirius holds him tighter to hear the grip of it. 

“I didn’t do a bloody thing, love, _you_ chose to be that way. You chose humanity, you chose to care and—and all the beautiful parts of you that you’ve shown me, I—you _chose_ to live.”

Sirius’ breath shudders around a bolt of tears and he tries not to listen to his bitter, racking spirit that twists with the knowledge that Remus is also _choosing_ to die tonight. 

_Fucking hell,_ Remus has always been a complicated collection of stubborn choices.

But damn it if he isn’t also the finest stack of choices Sirius has ever made. 

Remus shifts to pull something out of his pocket, and Sirius turns away from it as if the sight of the vial would burn his eyes. He doesn’t know what color it is, what sort of consistency it might have, doesn’t _want_ to know. Sirius knows that if he looks at the potion brewed specifically to kill Remus, he will never again be able to see the world in shades of anything besides whatever fucking color it might be. “When do you want to take it then?” He asks, his words sounding pale and jagged like exposed bone. 

“Not yet,” Remus murmurs through a subtle catch of tears. “I’m not done being with you yet.”

“I’ll never be done,” Sirius whispers. He kisses the crown of Remus’ head and sighs into the fragrant, gentle curls around his mouth. “But we already knew that.”

“Hell of a fucking show though, eh?” Remus suggests through a deep sniffle. 

Sirius smiles halfway to himself despite the mounting sense of dread within him. “Had we tried to orchestrate any of it, we’d have failed.”

“Miserably,” Remus agrees. His throat works around words for several second before he gives up with a withered sigh and holds in a sob. Sirius comforts him with a stroke of his thumb across his collarbone as he pulls atthe reigns of his own tears. 

“I love you so much,” Remus eventually manages to say. “I don’t—I haven’t the words, but you’re so important, Sirius, I hope you know this.”

“I do,” Sirius rasps. 

“I want you to take care of yourself,” Remus continues, gaining a bit more control of his voice as he turns to face Sirius. The striking finality of it all sears into Sirius’ core, but he finds purchase in the flint of Remus’ eyes and nods helplessly when Remus puts a hand to his cheek. “I want you to keep on, alright? You’re brilliant, you’re—too brilliant to let yourself fade out when I go, do you hear me? Promise me you’re going to be strong for me. You, and James, and Lily and Harry, and my da, and—and all of you, you have to stay strong together.”

“I promise,” Sirius weeps. _Don’t go, don’t do this—_ the half-light of the sitting room plays at the angles of Remus’ face and chisels his image like polished granite, the headstone he doesn’t want, the final stand of the beauty Sirius will never be able to forget even as his faculties might fade as Time rips them away however far into the future he makes it. 

“I‘ve loved you since the moment I met you,” Remus admits, gripping hard to the fabric of Sirius’ shirt. “I lost several years of happiness in there trying to ignore it, but you’re all I’ve ever loved. I can only hope I’ve done right by you, Sirius.”

“You’ve done everything right, you perfect berk,” Sirius says desperately, his voice ripping out of him as he pulls Remus into a haphazard embrace. _This is it, this is how it ends, this is real._ “I love you,” he says into Remus’ shoulder, the words like noise with how often he’s repeated it to the echo chamber of his thoughts but he’s manic to keep saying them, “I love you with all my heart, Remus.”

Sirius wants to say so much else— _I wouldn’t trade anything for the time we had, You’ve made who I am today, I would have adored you even broken and wasting—_ but the time for clawing at his depths has passed. He can’t draw up the words. He feels the lead of loss press in as Remus’ clenched hand moves into the space between them. 

Pulling back to take in the sight of Remus again, Sirius cards his hair back off his forehead sweetly and simply stares for several seconds. 

“You’ll be alright,” Remus says, as reassurance trembles in Sirius’ heart like a frightened hare. “Someday.”

“You’ll always be with me,” Sirius insists. Remus nods and takes his hand. 

“Will you spread me over the old Wexford beach?” Remus requests softly. “Ashes, with James and anyone else who wants to.”

Sirius closes his eyes briefly when sorrow shocks him, but he nods. “Anything for you.”

Remus pulls him into a kiss then, soft and slow in the most private press of closeness Sirius has ever shared with him. It goes on for forever and a moment at once, and when Sirius is dragged back down to the present by the sound of Remus unstoppering the vial he only refrains from collapsing by recounting the taste of Remus’ lips to his mind like a spell. 

“Be good,” Remus whispers, his perennial wish to Sirius whenever he would leave the flat at all, banal and teasing around its edges with just enough of a twist to bely Remus’ own mischievous streak. Sirius loves him so deeply it hurts. 

“You too,” Sirius replies through a fresh fall of tears. “I’ll see you again someday, yeah? Keep the bed warm for me.”

“Anything for you,” Remus volleys back gently. Sirius’ soul tears itself in two as he sees that perfect mouth curve into a sad smile, and he looks down at the floor with scrabbled avoidance when Remus lifts the potion in a motion like quaffing a shot. 

One sip. Sirius watches Remus wipe at his lips with the back of his hand through his periphery. 

That’s all it is, one sip.

Irrevocable.

It’s done.

Sirius winds himself around Remus again, his fingers tensing like iron when he feels Remus cling back to him. Afloat, afloat, life preservers in the current of living, _But what have we become when the life is leaving one of us?_

“Can I stay with you?” Sirius asks through the jump of a sob. “Until it’s through?”

“Please,” Remus whispers. His hand is strong where it holds to Sirius’ shoulder.Sirius doesn’t trust himself not to dissolve when that hold inevitably weakens. 

Several long moments drag past like heavy footsteps in sand. Surreality lays over the flat, thick like invisible snow and just as chilling.

“Sirius?” Remus finally slurs softly, sleep-groggy, impossible to tell apart now from his shaky half-woken voice every morning for the last nine years.

“I’m right here,” Sirius assures him. 

“Thank you,” Remus mumbles. “I would like to go to bed, love.”

Sirius lifts him, ignoring the burning protest in his limbs, draped across his arms like a half-asleep child, head tucked alongside Sirius’ hammering heart. He settles Remus on the clean sheets, white huddle pillowing up to cradle his body as Sirius climbs in to sit beside him. 

“There, set?” Sirius asks gently, his voice shaking. He bites down hard on his grief but can’t stop, can’t stay the tears. He wipes at the corners of his eyes with his sleeve as Remus nods drowsily and curls close to Sirius with stunted energy—fading quickly.

“I love you,” he sighs thinly. “Sweet dreams. See you in the morning.”

“I love you, too,” Sirius chokes out, their routine exchange before bed making his throat burn as he says it. He draws his knees up and strokes a hand across Remus’ forehead. “Sleep well, Moony.”

“Dream of me,” Remus says, a small and tired smile playing at his lips. His eyelids flutter shut as he reaches up to touch Sirius’ fingers gently before he slides it to the mattress, torpor swallowing him from the inside out. His breathing slows. 

“Always do,” Sirius replies, the final stroke of the tolling bell for their life together, as he crumbles into quiet tears.

Sirius counts the rise and fall of Remus’ ailing lungs with a protective hand.

_In, two, three, out, two three._

_In, two three, four, out, two, three, four, five, six._

Soon, they shallow.

Even sooner, like water going placid after the ripples of sunset wake, they go still. 

For once, Sirius' inner voice has nothing to say besides echoing silence.

Remus Lupin remains warm, but his heart stops beating. 

Sirius feels a light go out within him, snuffed, and knows he can never strike to life again. 

He mourns alone into the long stretch of night as Remus passes, deep and silent through the impenetrable dreams of departure.

Forever.

 

— _fin—_


End file.
